The Great Node War of 2017 Has Begun
It seems to be definitive and the date is set to August 1st that many core and segwit supporters will try and activate a user activated soft fork to essentially override the miner’s decision to withhold it. While there was a little bit of hope with the Silbert agreement, it seems that many are realizing that we will never see eye to eye and the best chance of getting segwit implemented without any stipulations is to activate a UASF.
In the last week many big names in bitcoin, including developers who originally stayed out of the debate are now pushing on the side of a UASF and the community is calling everyone to be ready on the first. Whether or not this happens will rely completely on the community and what percentage of nodes are signaling the UASF. Currently that number is around 10-11% but it seems to be slowly growing. We will see in the next few days if the growth can sustain itself, but with nodes it is possible for one person to rent out multiple VPS servers and run nodes.
In my opinion this is going to start what I am calling the great node war of 2017 which is basically going to be core supporters vs unlimited supporters throwing thousands of dollars to acquire as much nodes as possible. If the percentage going for UASF nodes breaks a 25 or so percent, there are going to be a large amount of unlimited nodes that are going to come online to try and negate them. I think what we are going to see in an arms race and big players throwing cash at each other in order to push their views.
I personally don’t think that the UASF is going to be successful just because I think there is too much money in the unlimited camp, that is going to prevent that from happening. Notably Roger Ver and Jihan Wu, who were pretty successful in blocking segwit on litecoin with the buying up of asic hashpower, until they reached an agreement with Charlie lee, creator of litecoin. I don’t think there is an amount of money too high that they won’t sacrifice in order to backup their ideology and I just don’t think that there are enough people with the funds and knowhow to fight them.
I don’t know what is going to happen in the future, but something really needs to break at some point. Either that is a hardfork and the two sides go their separate ways or the stalemate continues for another year, the latter being more probable. This infighting does nothing but hurt the users and people looking to actually transact using bitcoin. Both sides are to blame at some point in this debate, but who comes out with a better outcome, who knows.
Whether or not UASF is successful is not dependent on how many nodes, but rather how much hashrate decides to work on a new chain that invalidates formerly valid blocks. My guess is UASF is doomed. I'm buying popcorn futures now.
If you want to learn more about the UASF Sybil attack on Bitcoin and what this means for the future scaling of the network see my old post below:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@kyle.anderson/uasf-the-bitcoin-takeover-event-is-the-bip148-user-activated-soft-fork-a-contentious-sybil-takeover-of-bitcoin-to-force-segwit
At one point some decision has to be taken. Sooner the better. We will wait for it to happen @calaber24p
I have a question. There has been much talk that many of the new BIP148 nodes coming online in the last few days has been fake, meaning that they would shut off before August 1st. What would be the point of this? Is it to create a false sense of security among the UASF supporters so they will be caught red handed, or is it a completely different reason?
There are not really any "fake" nodes but there sure can be a lot of nodes signaling for BIP148 that won't follow through. Yeah this is for 'fluffing the numbers' to make UASF more appealing. Sybil attack on bitcoin.
There very well could be many "fake" nodes. It's very easy to spoof a node which is doing nothing more than relay and signaling (no validation, storage etc.). The reason you would do this is to be able to run lots of them at low computer resource cost.
Exactly, hence my (probably bad) use of the quotes. It is very cheap to spoof nodes, validating or not. This can easily be seen with the recent explosion of UASF nodes.
Yay, BTCC adds their first altcoin in years based on a sybilled Twitter poll, and Bitcoin is deciding policy based on easily sybilled node counts! It's like a trend.
Will this raise the price considerably in August?
Great read. I see your point of the 'war,' and I wish it was not the case. I am pleasantly surprised that the price is where it is even during this debate. Asia doesn't seem to care I guess.
Please google and read the Satoshi white paper - its actually a pretty short read. What you call 'nodes' are actually just non-mining wallets. In all the bitcoin documentation, only miners are called 'nodes'.
The first thing you need to know about bitcoin is that it only works because of the Proof of Work conducted by miners. Anything else turns into who has the most resources to conduct a sybil attack.
I have read the whitepaper. Technically they are non mining wallets, but the majority of the community considers them nodes, not just miners.
Great information. Thank you for sharing. ☆☆☆☆☆😎
This is some Mad Max Thunderdome shit right here!